HUNTERS (David Weil, Nikki Toscano). Some subtitles. All 10 episodes streaming on Amazon Prime Video Friday (February 21). Rating: NNN
The Amazon Prime Video series Hunters is two shows spliced into one: a grim meditation on the toll vengeance takes on those who carry it out, and a comic-book story of righteous avengers stalking unrepentant monsters through a heightened version of America in the 70s. One of those programs has internalized the dark corridors of Spielberg’s Munich the other turned that movie off halfway through to rewatch Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds for the 15th time.
Writer/producer David Weil – who runs the series with Nikki Toscano of Revenge and 24: Legacy – sets the action primarily in 1977 New York City, where aimless Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) meets a secret squad of Nazi hunters determined to mete out justice to the thousands of German war criminals who’ve found safe haven in America… and are plotting to build the Fourth Reich on its soil. So, a little tense.
The feature-length premiere is a stunner, with Weil and director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me And Earl And The Dying Girl) elegantly establishing the show’s premise and tone, paralleling Jonah’s awakening with the journey of Luke Skywalker in a certain blockbuster Jonah and his friends just saw: Al Pacino’s Meyer Offerman is his Obi-Wan, offering him a path to illumination that involves confronting an evil empire. (Weil also introduces a second protagonist, an FBI agent played by Grey’s Anatomy’s Jerrika Hinton, whose investigation into a mysterious death in Florida puts her on a collision course with Team Offerman.)
That first episode is intense and swiftly paced, and just stylish enough to play as present-day allegory (there’s a former SS member in Jimmy Carter’s cabinet!) without softening the very real atrocities that drive the never-again motivations of Meyer’s vigilantes – or the way Jonah finds himself questioning how far he himself is willing to go to avenge his beloved safta.
It’s a great start, but a silliness creeps into the subsequent episodes as Hunters tries to inject its narrative with playful pop elements like a montage that introduces the rest of the squad as 70s-style exploitation heroes and a fantasy dance number set to Stayin’ Alive.
But it’s difficult to introduce that stuff and then pivot back to gruelling re-creations of life in Auschwitz, or present-day material that’s just as dark. Lerman, Hinton and Pacino make convincingly complicated leads while Lena Olin, Carol Kane, Saul Rubinek and Dylan Baker are keep their exaggerated characters from turning into simple caricatures and Tiffany Boone, Kate Mulvany and Louis Ozawa gradually shade in their more one-note roles.
They’re all good to great, but other performances just don’t work: Josh Radnor, as a Tony-winning actor turned enthusiastic Nazi hunter, is operating in a key that doesn’t match anyone else’s pitch and Greg Austin, as a true believer who takes genuine pleasure in his cruelty, starts out as an unnerving blank but soon becomes a cartoon character himself.
Amazon made the first half of the season available for review, so it’s possible that the second half will pull all of these disparate strings together for a powerful finale the master plot has a good momentum going, and Pacino’s scenes with single-episode guests John Noble and Barbara Sukowa have an anguished power the rest of the show struggles to convey.
I hope there’s more of that coming, and less of the fourth-wall foolishness. Hunters has some worthwhile things to say about vigilance and vigilantes, and about the way a people can compromise their ideals for a momentary victory. After all, the sickest joke of Hunters is that in the “real” timeline the Reagan Revolution is just around the corner, which will bring overt racism and bigotry back into America, and pave the way for Bush II and Trump’s genuinely fascistic presidencies.
The real America didn’t need Nazi infiltrators to put a thumb on its moral scales it did that all by itself. Here’s hoping Pacino and Lerman can save the fake one.
@normwilner
